The official blog of Thomas J. Black: independent author and professional blind guy

Tag Archives: rewarding failure

Tommy Wiseau isn’t funny. Tommy Wiseau isn’t brilliant. Tommy Wiseau doesn’t deserve the cult status you people give him. Even if it’s crappy “hur hur memes r the lulz” cult status, because even when you’re laughing at the fail on such a widespread level, you’re still acknowledging that Tommy Wiseau exists, and you really shouldn’t encourage this level of failure.

For the three people who probably don’t know who this guy is, Tommy Wiseau wrote, directed, starred in, produced, and probably catered for a movie simply known as The Room. While saying this out loud isn’t exactly new, thought-provoking discussion, it still needs to be said: The Room is garbage. I’ve literally seen TROMA movies that had more effort put into them, and you’d be amazed how often Uncle Loyd recycles some of those shots of people driving cars.

Tommy Wiseau HIMSELF… A lot of people are convinced he’s trolling us, and that his persona, coupled with his shit movie, is the single greatest act of trolling ever. Somehow, I’m not buying it. I genuinely believe this guy thinks he’s a lot better at what he does than he actually is.

It’s one thing to be proud of your work. Hell, I’ve written a dud or two in my time (cough Family Reunion), but even I feel good about having a story out there in public.

It’s one thing to feel proud about your project, though, and it’s another thing to delude yourself into thinking you’re good at what you do. I’m not really sure what Wiseau thinks he’s doing. I’ve theorized that the man is either an anticomedian, a space alien, or one of THOSE artists. Neither of which are positives that justify his movie, but all the same, it gives me something to anchor to.

If it was just a bad movie made by a guy whose first language CLEARLY isn’t English, that’d be fine. Worst case scenario, it drifts around the ether of Amazon.com or wherever, we never hear from it again outside “art” circles, and the world is a beautiful place. Except I remembered that I live in the version of Earth where Donald fucking Trump is president, Tim Heidecker gets as many TV shows as he wants, and “I Miss the Misery” by Halestorm is considered a party song. So of course a movie that sucks this much gets elevated to cult status.

I personally subscribe to the Kevin Murphy philosophy that was briefly mentioned in his book, A Year at the Movies. I believe that failure shouldn’t be rewarded. Bad movies don’t deserve to be talked about. The Razzies, while fun, and possibly even cathartic to some, is ultimately the spirit award of cinema.

“Hey, buddy, how’s it going? How about that movie you made that bombed at the box office and nobody liked. Sure was a piece of shit, wasn’t it? Here, have a trophy.”

Failure shouldn’t be rewarded. At absolute most, failure is something you should keep in the ole disappointments room, and kept around only as a reminder of how yall done fucked up. Take that failure, and learn from it. Remember that this right here is how NOT to make a movie.

I grew up between the generation that buried hundreds of thousands of unsold E.T. cartridges, and the generation that says “Wow, Bee Movie sure did suck. Let’s spend an entire spring break polluting the internet with Bee Movie memes and convince the internet it’s worth remembering despite the fact it clearly isn’t.” Which basically means I received a spirit award or two (they were called fourth place ribbons when I ran track in high school), but I was encouraged to not put them on the same level as a medal or an actual trophy. They were a way of saying “Hey, you suck too much to get a medal, but at least you didn’t come in last.”

The fact people make The Room memes, or do parodies of popular movies on YouTube in the style of The Room is more recognition than this movie deserves, and more recognition than Wiseau HIMSELF deserves. With all due respect to the author, I don’t plan on reading The Disaster Artist out of fear it’ll only fuel the machine.

Now I’ll own up to liking a few bad movies in my time. I’m literally the only human being on Earth who seems to have actually LIKED Apollo 18, for example. I am a loud and proud fan of The Purge movies (though I really need to see the third one). Hell, I even liked Tusk. These movies are also bad… But unlike The Room, or anything else Wiseau has put out, these movies looked like someone actually put FUCKING EFFORT into them. There was a good idea here. There was a sequence of events that, at least in context of the universe, made perfect sense. Go ahead and disagree with the possibility The Purge could happen one day, or believe all you want that The Lost Cosmonaut Theory is bunk, but surely you can at least agree that there was some thought put into all this.

The Room… Ugh, The Room. I’ve seen honest to god Skinemax flicks that had better acting than this. Better set design, too. Hell, even the plot was more coherent and not repetitive. And have you actually WATCHED sex? Take your dick out of your hand, take all the anticipation and excitement out of it, and just watched it from an analytical level? It’s probably the most repetitive, monotonous activity out there!

Just because a movie is funny for all the wrong reasons doesn’t instantly make it good. Or even redeemable. It’s admirable that you managed to find a way to enjoy cinematic torture, but if I’m supposed to be taking this dead serious, yet all I do is laugh the entire time, yall done fucked up, son.

And I know memes don’t usually pick on good movies, but at the same time, the fact we’re even acknowledging this movie and this man even exist in the first place seems like we’re only encouraging him to keep existing. Hell, I’ve written, like, three pages or so of text at this point, and I’m already trying to justify posting this incoherent ramblefest outside the fact I’m fucking sick of seeing Wiseau memes on my Facebook feed.

I probably make it sound like I’m furious, but really, I’m not. Hell, at this point, I’m barely annoyed at absolute best. After years of being taught that failure isn’t something I should be proud of (not necessarily ASHAMED of, but not proud of either), I’m suddenly finding that we’re reveling in it.

“This movie sucks! Let’s give it ridiculous amounts of attention! Let’s have special viewings, and make dumb parody videos and put them up for everyone else to see!”

I just don’t get that mentality. Then again, I also don’t get why it’s suddenly okay for thirty-year-old men to admit out loud they watch cartoons for seven-year-old girls, or why after years and years of developing technology to where video games are practically fully rendered movies, the most popular things to play are the same fucking 8-byt “metroidvania” games we played in the days of the NES. Believe me, I could, and on occasion, HAVE ranted on those topics individually.

I just feel like all this time we’re spending giggling at Tommy Wiseau is doing two things:

First off, it’s not helping the guy. If anything, it’s only encouraging him to be as horrible at his job as humanly possible. By portraying The Room as “a spectacle”, and celebrating its horridness, you’re only telling Wiseau, and future generations (maybe) that this is okay.

Secondly, I feel like all this energy we’re putting into this clearly could be spent on better things. There are great things on Netflix right now that we could be watching. Sure maybe everything on Netflix’s original category isn’t for everyone, but surely there’s something there that’s more worth investing time in than the same fucking garbage cinema you’ve been meming, parodying, and overall inflicting on all of us for the last decade now.